Tohunga Suppression Act 1907

Both acts of togetherness and precision, all these things.

So yeah, so that's kind of what taonga pōrua are, and they were traditionally used by tōhunga, by our experts, our wise people, but also used by just normal whānau, and they've spent a long time being repressed through the Tōhunga Suppression Act and just colonisation in general, and then have been revived through the hard work of au kaumātua, and a lot of work of women who keep little bits of knowledge alive that was then pieced all together by haumanu of tāne who'd been around and kind of collected all this knowledge.

But yeah, I think it's important too to acknowledge, and a lot of my work acknowledges the work of wahine and takatāpui katoa, so who kept that knowledge alive and kept using it in the whānau, which is,

yeah, that kind of health-based work

But it would be pretty silly to then, then make the assumption that they didn't know.

Um, when many Tohunga practices were kept secret, the, the Tohunga, the spiritual guides themselves, their identities were kept secret, and with the Tohunga Suppression Act, of course no one was gonna be talking about the power of these medicines.

So I really love that right now there's a revival within, um, Rongo- um, within Ma- uh, Rongoa of, okay, well based off of what we know of the Maori worldview, what would we do today with these really sacred, um, medicines? And I think we all have that potential of remembering, how would we work with this medicine? Um, guess the second layer when I think about trauma and plant medicine specifically around psychedelics is that there's a lot of research right now around, um, how psychedelics are basically treating everything.

Everything from, um, you know, really high-risk individuals of, uh, treatment-resistant depression, end of life care, um, anxiety, um, to, you know, sort of every day mood enhancement, a little bit of focus, a little bit of creativity, um, to somewhere in between.